In a shopping mall, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the customers who spend their money and the mall security who keep them in line. These are their stories…
A rare trip to the shopping mall ended abruptly for Molly and me when we smacked into an especially earnest mall cop.
Shopping is not our thing.
In fact, I had forgotten how crowded a mall could be on a Saturday as we fought our way through hordes of latte sipping, stroller pushing, bargain seeking, public massage receiving, Bath and Body works sniffing shoppers.
“Geez, what’s the occasion?” I asked an equally puzzled Molly.
We ducked into a store in search of a pair of extra-long skinny jeans where I promptly lost Molly. In the four minutes it took me to select two sweaters and try them on, Molly already had sized up the available merchandise and moved on.
We don’t mess around.
I caught up with her near some tiny carousal animals where we regrouped and fought our way north. Trouble in the form of a lurking mall cop found us as I stood outside a store promoting “facial threading.”
I snapped a picture of the store’s façade, genuinely curious about “facial threading”, a concept that made my own skin throb.
“No photos in the mall, ma’am,” growled a smartly uniformed young man.
No photos in the mall seemed an unlikely rule for a building that routinely housed aggressive elves urging exhausted parents to buy photos of their youngsters sitting on a chubby man’s lap.
“Really?” I asked.
“It’s um, an anti-terrorism thing,” he said.
I pocketed my weapon and we moved on – a mortified Molly avoiding eye contact with her fellow shoppers and me chuckling merrily about being reprimanded by an officer who would probably be sitting in Molly’s freshman Civics class on Monday.
We turned left and I smacked right into our stalwart young pal, who was not amused.
“Perhaps it’s best we leave now,” I said to Molly, who purchased her extra-long skinny jeans online.
